| There are certainly legitimate complaints to be made about how Reddit empowers the volunteer work of moderators, but that is the least of the complaints that are clogging the site right now. There are three major objections being raised loudly and repeatedly: 1) Moderators, who provide a huge portion of the value of the site, are treated with disrespect by the organization. 2) An employee whose availability was useful to a few major subreddits was dismissed without warning, leaving those subreddits in the lurch, which is emblematic of the above disrespect. 3) Ellen Pao is CEO. These are presented in decreasing order of relevance to the actual problem, and increasing order of urgency to those driving the discussion. Pao needs to do an AMA. A small number of users is upset at her stance in favor of diversity and against sexism, and because she's historically refused to directly engage a community that's gotten used to having direct access to movie stars and presidents, those few have been able to convince many more that she's a cold bitch and doesn't deserve respect. She needs to be on the front page all day gracefully responding to the revolting things being said about her so that normal users can remember that she's an actual person and not an anonymous force of nature advancing evil in the world. Edit: Seems that's what she's doing right now. |
The minute that employee was fired and the pressure was building up, they should have reacted by saying (as much as legally possible) why she was fired. The internet is used to transparency. Then, they should have explained how Reddit, as a community, will move on. Meanwhile, the moderators should have been aware of what was going on since the very beginning and the administrators of the website should have relied on them to control their respective communities.
Firmly affirm the current situation, then firmly affirm your plan for the future.
They should have addressed the fears of the users. Users who are known to be very afraid of order and who will quickly pick up a mob mentality.
Instead of reacting quickly, the community was completely ignored and free to be scared. This resulted in making a meme of hating the CEO of Reddit. By meme, I mean that definition: "an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means".
It is too late to change this. Once the internet makes a meme out of something, and that meme catch, is it contagious and there is nothing you can do about it.
They then apologized. By apologizing, you are taking the blame in the eyes of everyone.
Ellen Pao will never be seen with respect by the Reddit community from now on. Instead, she appear to be an incompetent leader who is unable to deal with crisis.